My reading of comics is pretty spotty; the last time I read a book that dealt with Doomsday was when he was “possessed” by Braniac, and he IIRC ended up stuck in 3 or 4 transporters.
I’m sure he’s been used since then. How did he get out of the transporters? What’s happened since?
Apperantly. He’s supposedly busted free from Hypertime.
Doomsday is also quite intelligent now, isn’t he? My reading of Action has been spotty lately, but didn’t he say something to that kid before squishing him?
Well, cheez, how did he escape from the Big Collapse at the end of time then? (first person to suggest he stole a solid black spaceship parked at Milliways gets a sock in the nose.)
[deep breath]Okay, what happened was, In the miniseries The Doomsday War,after a fight with Superman(S), Brainiac (B) was severly injured and escaped into time. While trying to heal himself he somehow (it’s been a few years so I don’t remember all the details) managed to free Doomsday (D) from his prison at the end of time. He then temporarily had his consciousness transferred to D’s body and made plans to take out S. Along the way he kidnapped the newborn child of Pete and Lana Ross when S was flying the baby across country for emergeny medical care. B planned to permanently transfer to the baby and mutate it as his new body. He failed, of course, and in the process lost control of D. S and the JLA were fighting D and had the idea to trap him in a series of 4 JLA transporters, essentially keeping him in permanent statis. This worked for a while.
Cue Our Worlds at War. In desperation, looking for a weapon to use against Imperiex, Luthor and a version of the Suicide Squad convinced Steel to release D and Manchester Black used his psychic powers to turn Doomsdays single minded rage away from S to Imperiex. S and D fought their way to Imperiex who destroyed D with a glance.
However, somehow after the war Luthor had D recreated, this time incorporating some of S’s DNA, so D would be vulnerable to kryptonite. This time D had also evolved some intelligence and S was able to defeat him easily because D was now able to understand and fear pain, rather than just being a killing machine. The government took possession of D and Luthor gave him to Darkseid as part of a bargain they’d made during the war.
D next turned up in the one shot Superman vs. Darkseid, on Apokolips. He was still intelligent and was vaporized by Steel in the Entropy Aegis, the armor Darkseid created from one of the Imperiex drones. After that D didn’t show up again until his recent appearance when he took the cat out of the tree and killed the kid.
Evidently he’s evolved to the extent that even physical annihilation isn’t permanent. I suspect we wll soon see that he’s also developed enough intellect to understand that constant killing is wrong.[exhale]
Cadmus. Cadmus eventually cracked Superman’s genetic code, I think. One of their projects flew off into space with it, so Luthor may have had to reproduce the results later.
Then again, Superboy’s DNA is enough like Superman’s to be vulnerable to Kryptonite.
Right, it used to be that Kon’s human donor was the Cadmus director… Westfield? Who, thanks to one of Superboy’s Hypertime misadventures, was erased from all Hypertimelines.
Actually, looking at the first few Titans issues where he finds out about Luthor, he seems surprised, and although he doesn’t say Westfield, he does say his human half “was just one of [Cadmus’] whacked-out scientists”. So, he (and we) thought it was Westfield. We were lied to. Luthor had a mole in Cadmus at the time, so him sneaking in his stuff as the donor is plausible enough. No Hypertime shenannigans necessary (I think Westfield’s demise only removed his present selves, he wasn’t retroactively erased from history).
The only flat-out contradiction is that Superboy has any Kryptonian in him at all. It used to be he was all human, just altered to look like Kal-El and given as close to a Kryptonian suite of powers as Cadmus could come up with (some, like TK blasts, would develop as he aged). Now, he’s really half-Kryptonian, with more and more Kryptonian powers showing up every day, and on top of that he’s got a limited but impressive bunch of telekinetic powers. As we just saw, the Kid’s gonna be scary when he grows up.
I haven’t read the Superboy arc in question, but the distinct impression that I got from the summaries was that Westfield got erased. Totally. Retroactively. Perhaps I didn’t read them carefully enough…
Nevertheless, that’s not inconsistent with the stuff in Titans - if Westfield were erased, Kon might then remember a different Cadmus scientist as the donor.